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Billionaire businessman Warren Buffett reminded us in his 2006 interview with The New York Times, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” This year, the Koch Brothers and others decided that Wisconsin should be one of the battleground states for escalating the class struggle. They planned to decimate the largest and most organized force for economic justice, the labor unions, especially the public employee unions.

In 2010, the 1 percenters won the first round of their planned escalation, which was to send Scott Walker to the governor’s mansion. It was a comfortable win for them because the contest was in one of their favorite arenas, the Electoral Game.

The 1 percent probably didn’t expect hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites to fight back in 2011. The people refused to cooperate and turned to a different arena, the People-Power Game. In a harbinger of the Occupy movement, they occupied the state’s Capitol and drove their legislative allies to leave the state to prevent Governor Walker from implementing his union-busting plan. The 1 percent had no reason to expect mass direct action because, after all, labor leadership seemed firmly in the pocket of the Democratic Party, the other party controlled by the 1 percent and largely hostile to direct action.

What was the result of that direct action in 2011, Wisconsin’s second round? Labor and its allies blocked the right-wing juggernaut, temporarily. The direct action bought time. But then, in the end, Walker won out and passed his plan through the legislature. Round three went to him and his cronies.

2012 brought Wisconsin’s most recent round, on June 5: back to the Electoral Game. Outspent by seven to one (with other factors playing a role as well), labor and its allies lost. It’s a heartbreaker for the many who turned their lives inside out and gave so much to save Wisconsin from the disastrous agenda of the austerity state.

The score for the escalation of class struggle in Wisconsin is 3-1, with the 1 percent winning three rounds out of four. The Wisconsin Badgers football team’s traditional song is, “On, Wisconsin, On, Wisconsin, Fight, fight, fight, fight, fight.” There’s at least one more round to go, according to the song. The question is, will future contests take place in the electoral arena or the arena of nonviolent direct action?

Last winter, Daniel Hunter and I were invited to Wisconsin’s capital of Madison to facilitate a leadership strategy workshop, which included participants from organized labor and a wide variety of allies. What we found among them was a hegemony of Electoral Game thinking. The room was dominated by the assumptions of U.S. civics textbooks, and nothing Daniel and I did could break them out of the mold.

I expect that in the post-mortem following Tuesday’s loss, most of the analysis will stay within that mold as well: “If only we had not run the mayor of the city that Wisconsinites love to hate!” “If only we had gotten more support from the national Democrats!” “Now we’ll have to show them by electing Obama this November!” “If only we could have outspent them!” (Everyone knows that the 1 percent can vastly outspend the rest of us anytime they want to.)

The 1 percent’s huge funding advantage is not the only reason that the Electoral Game is skewed against us. The Electoral Game inherently supports voter confusion, by mixing up issues with candidates. I first saw that vividly in 1984, when I helped run a Jobs With Peace referendum in four counties of Pennsylvania when President Ronald Reagan was running for reelection.

We decisively won our referenda, even while Reagan won the presidential vote in the same counties. In our exit polls we asked people how they voted on the presidency as well as on the Jobs With Peace question. The referendum question asked whether money should be taken from the Pentagon and directed to jobs, education and other human needs. Over and over we heard voters who voted “Yes” for Jobs With Peace say they’d also voted for Reagan (who was famously enthusiastic about jobs for war). The typical voter response: “Well, I like Reagan because he’s a strong leader, but you know he’s wrong about this arms race thing and taking away money from our schools and housing and things like that.”

Polls tell us that a majority of people in the United States agree with the left on a wide variety of issues even when they vote for right-of-center candidates. The razzle-dazzle of candidacies blurs rather than clarifies.

The People-Power Game, by contrast, is best done through direct action campaigns that clarify the issue at hand. Wisconsin’s second round in 2011 and Occupy Wall Street did that, as did the November 2011 Ohio referendum that beat back the attack on unions in that state. The referendum is the closest thing in the electoral arena to direct action’s ability to clarify issues, but unfortunately referenda are also vulnerable to the 1 percent’s wealth.

In addition to its clarification advantage, direct action offers a persuasion advantage. On many issues, a direct action campaign doesn’t start with a majority on its side; examples are the civil rights movement’s campaigns and the anti-nuclear power campaign of the 1970s. Direct action campaigns have often been able to swing a majority over to the side of the campaigners.

Another advantage of the People-Power Game is the ability to take the offensive. In Wisconsin the unions and their supporters, after initiating the recall, found themselves on the defensive. Taking Wisconsin back to the days of Democratic leadership is hardly an inspiring prospect — it’s frankly second-rate compared with what workers’ struggle achieved in a number of other countries.

That wily old fellow who took on the greatest empire the world had seen up to that time, Gandhi, insisted that to win campaigns we need to stay on the offensive. That couldn’t happen in Wisconsin because of the choice to play the Electoral Game.

Sometimes, though, clarification, persuasion and staying on the offensive are not enough; it’s necessary to force change. Here again, the People-Power Game is superior to the Electoral Game. The U.S. labor movement understood that in the 1930s, when it (along with farmers, the unemployed and some middle class allies) forced the 1 percent to make major concessions by disrupting society and the economy through nonviolent direct action.

Any time that labor and liberals forget the people power advantage of direct action, all they need to do is consider the many cases in which elections were worthless and authoritarian regimes — even dictatorships — were overthrown by direct action campaigns. Wisconsin and the U.S. are not dictatorships. Progressives pleading powerlessness lack credibility. In Tunisia last year, the labor movement led a campaign that overthrew a dictator; if under such circumstances Tunisians could decide to give up being victims, we can decide to give up being victims in Wisconsin.

But, whether we’re in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania or any of the states where the class struggle is being deliberately escalated from above, can we step aside from the assumption that the Electoral Game is “the only game in town”?

Yes — but only if we get as serious about the craft of direct action campaigning as are the smart young organizers who are recruited by the Democratic Party to waste their talent in the Electoral Game. Direct action campaigning is a craft, and in the United States the skills for it were once more widely distributed, especially among African Americans. Now, not so much.

Will our bright young organizers learn the craft of People Power or the Electoral Game? The answer depends on all of us. It depends on how we tell our stories of social change in the past, and how we encourage one another to work for change in the future.

The political parties’ hegemony is widespread and fiercely defended; bright young people are given the impression that if they want to make a difference, the electoral arena is the only way available. Only if young people are reminded that the large response that sprang up in Wisconsin and Occupy last year is really there waiting for their talent, will they learn the craft that can actually make a difference: the nonviolent direct action campaigns driven by people power.

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George Lakey co-founded Earth Quaker Action Group which just won its five-year campaign to force a major U.S. bank to give up financing mountaintop removal coal mining. Along with college teaching he has led 1,500 workshops on five continents and led activist projects on local, national, and international levels. Among many other books and articles, he is author of “Strategizing for a Living Revolution” in David Solnit’s book Globalize Liberation (City Lights, 2004). His first arrest was for a civil rights sit-in and most recent was with Earth Quaker Action Team while protesting mountain top removal coal mining.

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5 comments

The real question is what kind of direct action? Political direct action alone, without the support of a constructive direct action program is as unsustainable as current U.S. electoral politics. Occupy’s surprising effectiveness in mobilizing people was that it combined political action with a constructive program to provide for basic needs, food, shelter, medical care, day care, information, self-governance and community. While the political action phase of Occupy has somewhat waned, building a constructive program has moved progressed. Strong constructive programs are more difficult to organize and take much longer to develop than political action campaigns. Which is part of the reason that academia and the media are gleefully declaring Occupy “over” even though the quiet work of building a constructive program is going on stronger than ever.

The group’s organisational power and economic potential give it a possibly subversive political appeal. “We can mobilise more people than anyone else,” Tsolakidis told Al Jazeera. “We receive about 5,500 orders for each sale of produce, representing about 45,000 people, or 55 per cent of the population of our town … Political gatherings are lucky if they get 50 people.”

Revolutionary, transformational social change requires direct political action, but that is not enough. People also need direct action that meets their most basic needs and provides the necessary foundation for political action. The Greek ‘potato movement’ also illustrates another fundamental of change that few understand. The micro-economy, family households and local communities, are the primary driving force behind transformational social change – not the macro-economy as virtually every political economist, capitalist, Marxist and anarchist believes.

Really great points here, Ed — thanks. One question that emerges, then, is the place of unions in this. To what extent do they really represent vital alternative institutions, and to what extent should protecting what rights they have in the political process be prioritized?

The unions used to have a strong constructive program, arguably more important than their political action activities – i.e. the old union halls were a truly radical space for community. In a way, they were the victims of their own success. New Deal legislation and wage victories provided a pathway into the middle class. This resulted in much of the unions’ constructive program being turned over to government or privatized, i.e. union members purchased on the market, goods and services formerly provided by their constructive programs. The unions just became a hollow shell of political action. The proverbial chickens came home to roost once Reagan was elected. Dependent on electoral political power, the private sector unions lost both popular and political support. Their political action program -and power – was likewise emasculated. The public sector unions are all that are left of once mighty union power and without a constructive program they too are all bark and no bite.

Part II of the union saga is their place in transformational change. It all depends on whether unions continue to see electoral politics as the answer or develop a more constructive approach, like participatory economics. It depends on whether they go for electoral shamocracy or worker direct democracy. The public sector unions could be pivotal as are essential services unions like the nurses.

At some point the anarchist narrative has to come into play. Electoral politics and the 1% government it creates has one primary purpose to maintain the capitalist economic hierarchy. It can be enlightened as was the case with Roosevelt or oppressive taking as we currently see. Progressives can be thought of as the enlightened side of maintaining the status quo. Any unions that continue with the progressive maintain capitalism agenda are likely to remain on the wrong side of the revolution. Like Lacan said if, “as revolutionaries you aspire to a master. You will get one.”

The man who initiated this war on the poor, the working class, and the unions was none other than St. Ronald Raygun (“Ray” is in reference to the rays of sunshine and smoke that he blew up the butts of the American people for eight years, and “gun” is in reference to how he continued pandering to the NRA in spite of nearly getting killed by a gun in 1981). It was Lyndon Johhson who declared a “war on poverty” in 1964, but Reagan declared a “war on the poor” that began in 1981 and continues today. The attacks on labor unions began in August of 1981 after Reagan fired all of the air traffic controllers who went on strike; unions were undermined and have declined ever since the early 1980’s. However, Reagan would be proud of what happened in Wisconsin only because it reinforced the twisted narrative that he began; the story was fully realized by the donations from a couple of rich Koch-heads. We don’t need the evil spirit of Ronald Reagan in 2012, as it already exists in the body and mind of Mittwit Romney; we need the ghost of Tom Joad for the strength of the working class who built our country. The time is right for a revolution, and the Wall Street white-collar criminals have been warned; your days are numbered, and Mitt Romney cannot protect you if/when he is defeated in November.
Paul Haider, Chicago

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